The 2017 FQXi Essay Contest is Wandering to a Conclusion!

The 2017 FQXi Essay Contest, “Wandering Toward a Goal: How Do Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise To Aims and Intention” has completed the initial round of competition. The essay, The How and The Why of Emergence and Intention, authored by George Gantz, has done remarkably well among the more than 200 entries, achieving a 5th place in the community scoring. Evaluation now moves to an outside panel of experts, with the award announcements following sometime this summer.

His essay focuses on the process by which increasingly complex and novel behaviors emerge in complex systems. This process, and the remarkable and beautiful phenomena we see in physics, chemistry and biology, cannot be explained from the bottom up, under a model of causal determinism. There is an intentionality, a goal-seeking behavior, inherent in the process. Rather than being merely random, the universe exhibits a purpose. This view is contrasted with the multiverse hypothesis, which denies the possibility that the trajectory of our universe exhibits any form of selection. Instead, adherents speculate that at every point where a divergent possibility exists, e.g. every choice, and every quantum event with multiple possibilities, the universe splits. The fact that we are here in this one is simply a contingency – this particular universe, among the many, is the one that led us here.

The cosmic intentionality we experience is a flowing process that attracts systems to desired outcomes and that affirms cooperative behaviors among units with a system. In addition, the process is fundamentally reciprocal – each level influences the one below and the one above, in an endless chain of reciprocity. What force can be described as a force for attraction, cooperation and reciprocity? That force is love.